Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller

neither of us had the answer to that question. Without the house, Charlie and I were undone from one another, uprooted and uncoupled. We had reached the point of speaking past one another, as if in a code intended for someone else entirely. And yet the idea of not belonging under the same roof was unthinkable to both of us.
    When my father spoke of his parents’ divorce, which he did rarely, and then only when it sounded as if I was contemplating the same thing, he would not use that word. Instead, he would say, “When the house broke apart.” And I knew what he meant. You hear about so-called good divorces, about amicable detachments, about houses morphing into two—holidays taken together, Christmas Days spent under one roof, children’s graduations attended en masse. But ours would not be that kind of uncoupling. We’d come together with too much passion to break apart gently. We’d tried separations before and the trauma of the near-catastrophic implications of what our divorce would be had always pulled us together again. Ours would be a house breaking apart and that is a monumental, irreversible event, as if a geological eruption has occurred. Survivors will be scattered to the four corners of the earth; they will have the shocked, wounded expressions of people who have endured an explosion. It will be terrible and biblical. “And if a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”
    A few more days passed. Friends phoned to say they had dropped off soup and flowers for me at the bottom of the stairs. Mum sent a care package of Epsom salts and aspirin from Zambia. Vanessa sent an e-mail that read like a fractured hallucinogenic neon sign pulsing over a midnight diner: “Hi Al, are you DYING? Mum says you’re ‘dying.’ Do you have the BLACK plague? Leave me something juicy in YOUR WILL  . . . ‘Only joking.’ Love you lots and lots, so please don’t peg it. Xxxxxx Van.” The kids pushed get-well notes under the door and shouted requests; could they eat this, play that, go there? Charlie ebbed in and out of the room, anxious and depressed. I felt restless with worry too, but helpless to do much about it.
    My eyes, bloodshot with coughing, were too sore for reading or writing. The radio—hours of indifferent contemporary music and repeating loops of news for much of the day—only added to my sense of shiftlessness. Eventually, as much to reassure myself out of my unproductivity as anything else, I went up into my office and found my old tape recorder and the stack of tapes of the dozens of interviews I had done with my parents over the years. I brought the tape recorder down to our bed and put it on the pillow next to my head.
    I had made the tapes in part because I had wanted some concrete way to reach back home; a way to tell my U.S. -raised children, “These are the other people you came from. Here are their stories. Here is how they sound.” But I had never played the tapes for any of our three children because it turns out real children don’t tend to work the way we imagine they might, as little vessels into which we can decant our own reconstituted pasts. In my experience, young children exist almost forcibly in the present; they have scant interest in their heritage. They little care if their ancestral histories are erased, or if the graves of their forebears and relatives have been untraceably overrun. To begin with, it’s we who care and we try to make our children care too; we remind them to hold on to the idea we have created of ourselves; we tell them to remember where they come from. We are the ones who say, “This is your special identity.” And by extension there is the implicit instruction, “Become violently attached to it.”
    Listening to the tapes now, I was struck by my younger voice asking the questions, the accent still purely colonial English so that it’s almost indistinguishable from Mum’s and certainly nothing like the accent I now have. I was struck